For one general history I'll put in a plug for Jill Lepore's We Hold These Truths. It's a well-researched book: she's a well-regarded scholar. It brings in narratives of groups that have been under-served in a lot of histories: women, homosexuals African Americans and Native Americans. It is a good political history, detailing the ideas , arguments, decisions that were made in the creation of the US. It's not another bland narrative of cheerful relentless progress, but it also doesn't simplify the details to make it a story of a powerful elite continually keeping its knee on the neck of the struggling masses. It explores the real divisions and contradictions that were embedded in that creation of the country- how you could have a slave-holding democracy, or a constitution that separated church from state but political leaders that would speak of being motivated by their Christian fervor.

It's not perfect. It's a big book, and it would have been better if she could have knocked it out in a couple of volumes because the single volume has to have some gaps, as she admits. There is nothing on the actual fighting of the American Revolutionary War - once the Continental Congress agrees, she has nothing until the surrender at Yorktown.... as though victory was just inevitable. Maybe she felt that it would have glorified ( yet again) a few Great White Men...and she'd have a point. But, if you want to read about the course of the war,, you'll need another book, like Don Higginbotham's The War For American Independence.